I bought something on my phone recently and I'm guessing Gmail saw the email from the vendor or something and a few seconds later the Microsoft web browser on my work computer started advertising for precisely that item. I felt more than a little violated. People used to call you crazy for saying this was tracked and it's all normalized now. It's more than a little dystopian.
What I find extra-annoying about the tracking is that it stopped pretending to be helpful. I remember chatting with my spouse on Google Messenger around 2012. We were discussing what to have for dinner when whatever the google assistant was called at the time popped up a message
"Traffic is unusually heavy right now due to an accident on Kirkwood. If you want to pick up a pizza from Avers and be home by six, you should leave work in the next seven minutes."
Was it creepy? Hell yes, but at least it was useful. The companies haven't cut back on spying on me, but, in an effort to pretend that they aren't, they've stopped sharing the useful information with me. Instead, they keep it to themselves to mine for the perfect car advertisement to send to a guy who doesn't have a license.
Accidentally revealing your intelligence gathering capability is a
famous trade-off problem. The Allies in WW2 occasionally had to let a
ship get sunk rather than make it obvious that the Enigma had been
cracked [0]. Plausible alternatives are usually assured to be in
place, for example radar in the above case, or parallel construction
in modern law enforcement.
Bigtech are likely increasingly careful about making it too obvious
that certain technologies (for de-anonymisation and correlation) are
in use. Most people will still believe in unlikely coincidences rather
than sophisticated behavioural analysis and covert monitoring of
audio systems etc.
They cooperate with providers and act as a middleman between them and advertising buyers... visit a site of a cooperation partner of utiq (e.g. Süddeutsche Zeitung) on a phone and a banner of them pops up. Probably kicks in once the tracker sees you're coming from a network range that matches a phone ISP.
Facebook suggests friending someone I worked with at once place 18 years ago and never spoke to or messaged since, and they show me adverts for both breast enlargements and erectile disfunction, and for hyper-local events in countries I don't live in and for people with citizenships I don't have.
